Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Tag conservatism

David Alpert calls out Virginia Tea Party group as land use statists

David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington has been on top of a story out of Virginia about a Virginia Tea Party group and its bizarre and seemingly anti-free market opposition to a state law forcing local governments to make room for dense growth. The law – which was passed a few years ago by Republicans, as David notes – included a few provisions, but the one in question, which a longtime Northern Virginia Republican is seeking to overturn, required each locality to designate an “urban development area” in which it would allow medium density development. It appears that the original plan was to have an urban growth boundary too, outside of which development would be much harder, but I’m not sure that was included in the version that passed. But whatever the rest of the law contained, Del. Robert G. Marshall and Virginia’s Campaign for Liberty are only opposing the provision that forces localities to provide upzoned land “sufficient to meet projected residential and commercial growth” for the next decade or two. I’ve read the bill (it’s relatively short), and the provision in question doesn’t even put a floor on density in the zoning area or cap the amount of parking allowed – all it does is force local governments to allow developers to build at higher densities. Here is, as far as I can tell, the strictest condition on the UDAs, which also have to allow mixed uses and smaller lot set-backs: The comprehensive plan of a locality having a population of 130,000 or more persons shall provide for urban development areas that are appropriate for development at a density on the developable acreage of at least eight single-family residences, 12 townhouses, or 24 apartments, condominium units, or cooperative units per acre, and an authorized floor area ratio of at least 0.8 […]

New Years link list

Behold, your first link list of 2011! 1. The automobile may officially in decline (very good article!). 2. Interesting parallels between China and its HSR intellectual property disputes and post-WWII Japan and Korea. More here. 3. Fred Barnes writes a stupid article for the Weekly Standard (“The road to hell is paved with bike baths”), and Jarrett Walker responds with a treatise on “coercion” (“We are the libertarians!”). 4. I forget that although rent control has been thoroughly discredited in the real world, NYC developers are still grappling with it. Vornado and another developer had to shell out tens of millions to break the rent control grip on a Central Park South building they bought, with 15 rent controlled tenants receiving payouts of around $1.5 million each. 5. Vancouver is loosening its grip on the street food market, while Stephen Goldberg is trying to create a one-stop shop for getting NYC restaurant permits/licenses/certificates/inspections. 6. The market-defying schemes that liberals come up with would be amusing if they weren’t so horrifying. Read here as they puzzle over why excess luxury condos built in NYC during the boom couldn’t easily be used as affordable housing (Vancouver redux), and watch out for the part on the third page where an organization called “Right to the City” advocates “using eminent domain to seize vacant residential buildings and turn them into affordable housing.” 7. Niagara Falls’ decades-long megaproject failures. The article ends on a positive note, citing federal money for a new train station and grants for a wine bar and a concert hall, but I wonder if anyone in Niagara Falls ever bothered trying to loosen up the parking restrictions and maybe upzone a few blocks.

Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

It’s no secret that conservatives and libertarians don’t have very warm feelings towards urbanism. But with their emphasis on upzoning and reducing parking minimums, shouldn’t new urbanism and smart growth have at least some libertarian constituency? And given that local roads are paid for almost entirely out of general funds – that is to say, local roads are a blatant example of socialist redistribution – you’d think that there would be people on the free market right advocating raising the gas tax and tolling highways. But alas, no such luck. Michele Bachmann thinks roads shouldn’t count as earmarks, Carl Paladino’s never met a road he didn’t want to detoll, and Mother Jones managed to cobble together a whole article’s full of “We don’t need none of that smart growth communism”-style rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. Now, it could just be that there are just too many suburban Republican voters whose homes, lives, and culture are invested in sprawl for any politician to oppose it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of support from libertarian think-tanks and magazines, who, by virtue of their complete lack of political viability, don’t have to worry about politics and getting re-elected in the suburbs. Cato and the Reason Foundation still toe the “war on drivers” line, with Randal O’Toole denying that any developers even want to build less parking than current minimums require. So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit […]

Your consolation link list

Apologies to everyone for the light posting – over the next few weeks I may be a bit busy with job and internship applications (any suggestions for work or job offers would be very much appreciated!), but hopefully I’ll still be able to put up a few posts a week. But for now, all you get is this mammoth link dump: 1. Vancouver’s laneway housing program (which we discussed earlier) has been off to a brisk start, and though planners are looking to liberalize sewer rules, they’re also considering only allowing one-story houses as-of-right, and limiting the amount of new laneway houses per block. 2. Former Market Urbanism contributer Sandy Ikeda writes about the urban origins of liberty at the Freeman. 3. The Dukakis Center has released a report suggesting that the gentrification caused by new light rail lines might cause driving to increase, defeating the purpose of TOD. Megan McArdle has also been discussing gentrification. Hopefully I’ll write something about this and gentrification more generally soon, but I wanted to post this in case I don’t get around to it. Any thoughts from the commenters on why this is and how it can be avoided? 4. North Korea “declare[s] war” on its version of the jitney, the “servi-cha.” 5. LA is the only big city in America whose fire department mandates that all skyscrapers have flat roofs so as to allow helicopters to land, but this may be changing (Curbed, parts 1 and 2). 6. Disabled riders file a class-action lawsuit against NYC’s MTA “for not spending a federally mandated 20% of [subway] station rehabilitation budgets on improvements like elevators and ramps.” The ADA’s impact on mass transit and urbanism is something that I’d eventually like to discuss more in depth, but I haven’t seen much research or even many […]

Another On “Conservatives” and Urbanism

While I sympathize with the theme and agree with regards to roadway spending and “conservative” hypocrisy, a recent article in the progressive The American Prospect takes a narrow-minded view of politics and urbanism, while throwing around broad generalizations about evolution and global warming to support their assertions: The Conservative Case for Urbanism In fact, one doesn’t have to be concerned about climate change at all in order to support such policies; values of fiscal conservatism and localism, both key to Republican ideology, can be better realized through population-dense development than through sprawl. Tom Darden, a developer of urban and close-in suburban properties, said Wednesday, “I’m a Republican and have been my whole life. I consider myself a very conservative person. But it never made sense to me why we would tax ordinary people in order to subsidize this form of development, sprawl.” Darden told the story of a road-paving project approved by North Carolina when he served on the state’s transportation board. A dirt road that handled just five trips per day was paved at taxpayer expense, with money that could have gone toward mass transit benefiting millions of people. “Those were driveways, in my view, not roads,” Darden said. I agree with Darden. However, so-called “progressives” fall into the same narrow minded trap when they support public transportation as a solution to global warming that “conservatives” fall into when they try to protect their auto-centric lifestyle. Many are really calling for more of the same top-down overspending on transportation infrastructure that will require a taxpayer bail out at some time in the distant future. Where is the rational voice trying to slow down overspending on all energy-reliant, sprawl-creating, redistribution of productive resources? While existing transit may be less bad environmentally in comparison to highways when looked at from a […]

Conservatives and Urbanism

Matthew Yglesias – Straight Talk on Gasoline on drilling and how conservative deviation from free-market principles has hurt the environment: Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where the gas price issue wouldn’t hurt so much. But there’s a movement afoot to change things. Similarly with minimum parking rules — regulations that interfere with the operation of the free market in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to live energy efficient lives. And again, there are people trying to change this. These things are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Naturally, conservatives have chosen to aim all of their fire at anti-drilling regulations. And that’s the sort of thing that makes the conservative movement hard to take seriously — it’s an organized defense of existing power and privilege that now and again adopts principled rhetorical modes of various kinds but basically can’t be moved to act unless some lobbyists pay them too. Similar arguments could describe progressives too, but that (and drilling for oil) is a topic for other blogs… I agree about the inconsistent anti-market sentiments of conservatives when it comes to urbanism. Conservatives tend to embrace socialism when they can abuse government to create barriers that exclude others from their communities, but not when others benefit from socialism. (Public schools, free parking, government roads, exclusionary zoning, community centers, etc…) They are just fighting over different […]

Trending now

A self-defeating argument
Texas MUD
gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation